Must Read Sci-Fi Novellas

Ships

Boomers For The Stars

Recent Posts

Carol

Punishing Parameters

Carol Kirkpatrick, possibly the brightest writer I ever met in a writing group (proof positive being her ability to scribble out a pithy, brilliantly crafted story on the spot) had the additional charm of treating me to an oral history of Brooklyn whenever we walked its streets together.  Combining warmth, depth, humor, and subtlety well into her 90s, she will always represent perfectly what I’d like to be when I grow up.  My hope is to charm you with this sample of her writing:

Madonna/Whore

Those were the parameters of growing up female in the decade 1945-1955.

It wasn’t just a continuum—it was the simultaneous experiencing of the world experiencing you as both these extremes and all points in between at the same time.  You weren’t a person.  You were either a good girl or a slut.  Sometimes both at the same time.  How did we deal with it.  Ineptly.  Psychotically.  Schizophrenically.  Tragicomically.

How did anyone survive?  With deep and terrible scars.

Other Stuff

Raucous Res

Married with children.  Closeted in a predictable, somewhat sterile, suburbia. It was a sudden overabundance of dental bills that pushed me over the edge. I’d been living off the father of my children for a very long time.  My youngest child had finally entered school, ending my excuse to pursue…
Read More
Aging

Dad’s Dementia

It started with his complaining that he was forgetting names. I pooh-poohed it, pointing out that I was 30 years younger and I never remembered people’s names. In retrospect I shouldn’t have used myself as a yardstick. My dad had spent his life working with large groups of people whose…
Read More
Reviews

Ridiculous Rating

Total Recall (2012) I’ve always loved imdb.com but their 6.2-out-of-10 rating for the 2012 version of Total Recall, starring Colin Farrell and Bokeem Woodbine, is nothing short of criminal.  This brilliantly inventive, supremely high-octane, sci fi film deserves no less than…and I’m being conservative here…an 11.  The world-building alone, with…
Read More
General Rantings

Senior Statesmen

Senior Statesmen…not!  Would that the two bickering children I beheld on June 27th…who I can only forgive because both of these senior citizens have obviously lost it one way or another…could even be described as gentlemen! Given my own age, I am…whether you like it or not…claiming the right to…
Read More
Flash Fiction

Idiotic Intelligence

My calling this fiction is, tragically, a bit of a stretch… “But I’m holding the letter I received today in my hand!  At first I thought, when I started getting these letters, that it was a scam, an attempt to get me to call some bogus number and give my…
Read More
Menu